The Window

The Window, Henri Matisse, 1916, oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts

Henri Matisse’s 'Reading Girl in White and Yellow'

• 1919

Barnes Foundation

Location 300 North Latch's Lane,
Merion, Pennsylvania

The Barnes Foundation is an educational art institution in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1922 by an American physician Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who collected art after making a fortune by co-developing an early antimicrobial drug marketed as Argyrol.

With the enormous profits from the sale of the drug, Barnes accumulated a large collection of mainly French Impressionist art works, which today form the holdings of the Barnes Foundation, an educational art institution established by his will. The paintings were valued in March, 2010, at $25 billion.

Today, the Foundation possesses more than 2500 objects, including 800 paintings. Among its collection are

• 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
• 69 by Paul Cézanne,
• 59 by Henri Matisse,
• 46 by Pablo Picasso,
• 21 by Chaim Soutine,
• 18 by Henri Rousseau,
• 16 by Amedeo Modigliani,
• 11 by Edgar Degas,
• 7 by Vincent Van Gogh,
• 6 by Georges Seurat,
• as well as numerous other masters, including Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, El Greco, Francisco Goya, Edouard Manet, Jean Hugo, Claude Monet

Website http://www.barnesfoundation.org

more info

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Foundation

More facts about Albert C. Barnes:

• The son of a poverty-stricken Civil War veteran, he grew up in the verminous, squatter slums of Philadelphia, with a burning determination to get rich.
• Argyrol was an instant and worldwide success, and Barnes was a millionaire before he was 35. In 1928, with superb timing, Barnes sold out Argyrol for an estimated $4,000,000, not long before the discovery of antibiotics, which largely replaced it.
• Guided by his lifelong friend, Artist William Glackens, Barnes began to buy up French impressionist paintings by the boatload.
• Although many of his early purchases were mistakes, he showed taste and a fine instinct for good investment. He was one of the discoverers of Modigliani. In one moment of sound judgment he bought 60 Soutines for $50 apiece—long before Soutine was well known.
• In time Barnes assembled the world's greatest collection of Matisses, the largest group of Cezannes outside the Louvre, and over $50 million worth of art by Picasso, Braque, Gauguin, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ben Shahn.
• When his collection outgrew his home and factory, Barnes built a marble temple to house it in suburban Merion, surrounded the place with ferocious police dogs and a ten-foot "spite wall."

Book - Art Held Hostage: The Battle over the Barnes Collection

‘Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917′ at MoMA (through October 11, 2010)

“Interior With Goldfish,” left, is paired with “Goldfish and Palette” in the Museum of Modern Art’s Matisse show, which offers a close reading of four of the most arduous years of his career

“Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917,” seeks to explore Henri Matisse’s moment, a pivotal five-year period in which the artist produced what may have been the most creative and experimental art of his celebrated career.

The new show covers the years between Matisse’s return from Morocco to Paris in 1913 to his departure to Nice in 1917. The show features nearly 110 of Matisse’s works, including paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings. According to the biography “The Unknown Matisse,” by Hilary Spurling, the artist often compared his development to that of a seed. “It’s like a plant that takes off once it is firmly rooted,” he said.

During the years covered by the show, Matisse was a man in motion, moving from one city to another, one model to the next, veering from almost undiluted abstraction to a sensual naturalism. He repeatedly reworked his canvases to find fresh ways to give form to his evolving ideas. He was inspired and challenged by the world around him–the Cubism championed by Picasso, the Moorish architecture from his travels in Spain and Morocco, even the Notre Dame Cathedral visible from his studio window in Paris.

According to the book “Matisse and Picasso: The Story Of Their Rivalry And Friendship,” by Jack Flam, Matisse once said “One can’t live in a house too well kept. One has to go off into the jungle to find simpler ways which won’t stifle the spirit.”

Matisse was searching for something deeper than what could be seen on the surface. In Spurling’s book “Matisse the Master,” she quotes the artist as saying of photography that “Its real service was in showing that the artist was concerned with something other than external appearance.”

The exhibition begins on July 18 and is on display through October 11.

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Blue Nude (Memory of Biskra), 1907. Oil on canvas. 92.1 x 140.4 cm (36 1/4 x 55 1/4 in.) The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Cone Collection.

Matisse's 1915 "Still Life After Jan Davidsz. de Heem's 'La Desserte,'" is a rendition of an academic copy of de Heem's painting that he made in 1893